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Sorry for bumping the thread, but what is the point of ideas such as emptiness, dependent origination, and impermanence? I've been interested in Buddhism for some time, and have read up on these philosophies. They seem to make sense and I know of nothing which contradicts them (I don't know of any object or phenomenon which is permanent and has an independent existence). But the problem I'm having is the usefulness of these ideas. It's like, no poo poo that everything exists because of prior causes, no poo poo that things are always changing from one moment to the next, no poo poo that we're products of the world and aren't separate from it and everything's connected and our ideas of separation are ultimately arbitrary. But what's the point of acknowledging all of that? How does it deal with the problem of suffering?
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Jun 24, 2013 06:33
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I apologize if this is a stupid question, so here goes: are Hinduism and Buddhism at all compatible? I know that Hindus believe in the atman and Brahman and Buddhists don't, but then again Daoists believe in the Dao and Shintos believe in kami, and yet there has been some synchronization between those religions and Buddhism. But Buddhism seems to contrast itself strongly with Hinduism, and a lot of stuff I read about Buddhism heavily emphasizes how the Hindu concepts of atman and Brahman are totally wrong. Are there any traditions or sects or whatever who try to reconcile Hinduism with Buddhism? What about Buddhism and other religions or philosophies? Can you be both a Buddhist and a Christian or Jew or Muslim?
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Jul 30, 2013 05:37
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PiratePing posted:While I agree that picking and choosing which parts of Bhuddism you like defeats the purpose (how do you even do Buddhist practice while ignoring anatta), how essential is believing in rebirth? I was raised with the idea "It's there, but just forget about it because you're living this life now" and now that I'm leaning more towards non-belief I still feel like the issue is neither here nor there. Believing in it because that would make me a Good Buddhist without really understanding it to be true just makes it feel like a convenient idea to cling to so I let it be for now, maybe it's something I will come to understand later in life. I'm not rejecting it but I also can't find a way to accept it with integrity. From what I understand, rebirth isn't reincarnation. Reincarnation is one-to-one: a single self becomes a new self. So with rebirth, it's more like a single being gives rise to many beings. A good analogy would be that when you die and your body decomposes, the organic molecules and chemical energy are recycled in the ecosystem, and help to give rise to new organisms. Similarly, think of all the things that have happened because you were alive. Think of all the things you've done and all the people you've met and affected. So, from both a biological standpoint and a purely causal standpoint, you have given rise to new things, and because effects cannot be separated from their causes, you are those things. And all of those effects will in turn affect other things and so on, so your existence is permanently stamped into the world, and the effects of your existence will continue even long after you're dead. Since we have no inherent existence, everything is ultimately connected and rather than being a separate entity you are intimately a part of the greater whole. I could be wrong about that, though. I'm more of a pantheist than a pure Buddhist, anyway. Blue Star fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Aug 2, 2013 |
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Aug 2, 2013 21:35
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Has anyone in this thread experienced ego death through meditation? I've heard of ego death happening in sensory deprivation chambers and through the use of psychedelics, but since this is a Buddhism thread let's just stick to meditation. I've never been in deep meditation, but I've come to understand that your sense of time slows down and you lose at least some sense of individuality because you're concentrating on the present moment. Is this true, and is it possible to lose all sense of "I" while in a deep state of meditation?
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Aug 6, 2013 01:46
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The-Mole posted:Jhanas are basically stages or degrees of this. I ask because I'm curious about what it feels like. I think about death a lot. Maybe not the healthiest thing to do, but whatever. Anyway, assuming there's no afterlife, which is impossible to know for 100% certain but there's no scientific evidence of one, death would be a state of non-existence. We can't imagine non-existence, but maybe ego-death is the closest we can get while still being alive and conscious. No sense of personal identity, no sense of time. I'm very curious about those who have experienced this state and how it affected your feelings about death, non-existence, or any other "big questions".
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Aug 6, 2013 10:12
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The-Mole posted:Just to be really clear, I in no way meant to nitpick your post. Experiences where the self drops off temporarily are really all around us in life, though by nature very difficult to notice. Many people seem to think of it as an absolute 'All-self' or 'zero-self' kinda thing. By nature, it seems to be more of a spectrum. Often the self drops off a bit and makes a bit of room for something else. Day dreams, getting lost in thought for a moment, forgetting time for a bit, forgetting to breath for a few moments, sleeping, dreaming, getting absorbed in work or a game are a bunch of day-to-day ways in which self-perception (aka proprioception) drops off for a bit without us having to do anything. I'm just wondering whether or not complete egolessness can be experienced through meditation. I'm intrigued by it. I understand emptiness and dependent origination intellectually but I don't feel them. I don't feel like I'm "one with all things" and "everything is connected", even if they intellectually make sense to me. But I want to feel it and know it on a visceral level. Because sometimes I think about it and think "It's a nice thought, but I'm really just trying to make myself feel better about dying and disappearing." In a GBS thread, I used an analogy about how I look at existence: that everything is like waves on an ocean. The waves are ephemeral and transient, but the ocean remains. So when I die, it's like my wave is breaking and receding, but I was never separate from the ocean to begin with, and it's only my pattern that is disappearing. Except that I also used the word "God", and I wonder if all I did was use a cutesy metaphor.
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Aug 10, 2013 00:57
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Can anyone explain Yogacara to me? I've been Googling it and there seems to be conflicting information as to whether its a form of metaphysical idealism (only mental stuff is real), but other people say that it isn't, even though the name translates to "mind-only" or "consciousness-only". Those people say that Yogacara (and Eastern philosophy in general) is only concerned with epistemology, not ontology. Western philosophy, when it comes to the idealism/realism debate, is concerned with the ontology, but all Yogacara is saying is that, regardless of what ultimately exists, the mental is what we're presented with, and is therefor what we know about the world. But if that's the case with Yogacara, what makes it different from other forms of Buddhism? I thought Buddhism in general was only concerned with phenomenology, and maintained that the world we perceive is illusory since it's all ultimately in our heads. Not literally solipsism, but only that what we KNOW of the world is all simply in our heads, and everything we believe about the world is what we're bringing to the table, and are not objective reality.
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Aug 13, 2013 17:57
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So the five skandas are form, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. I understand the first four, but what is consciousness? In my understanding, you have to be conscious OF something: of your own body, of the outside world, of your thoughts and emotions, of your memories, etc. But what is consciousness itself, according to Buddhism?
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Aug 23, 2013 02:26
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Cardiovorax posted:I've been interested in Buddhism for a long time now, but whenever I think about it I find myself wondering what it can actually do for me. I'm think it's intriguing because I think that it has good insights into human nature and how the world works, but on the other hand I can't find much of a point in the actual practice. I'm an atheist and a naturalist and as such the supernatural elements just don't mean anything to me. I don't believe in souls or reincarnation, so being concerned about karma seems pointless - once I'm dead I'm gone forever no matter what I do, so there isn't really anything to work for. Good! Buddhists don't either. No offense but your post sounds pretty ignorant about Buddhism, since you assume they believe in such things when any 101 intro to Buddhism will tell you that they don't. One of the central doctrines of Buddhism is anatta (Not-Self), which basically says that we don't have eternal souls that contain the essence of our being. Reincarnation is a Hindu concept, not a Buddhist one. The correct term is rebirth, but there is lots of debate about what exactly rebirth means, so I can see why there's some misunderstanding. Some say rebirth is just a metaphor for our constantly changing mental states. Others use an analogy like the recycling of our organic molecules into the environment; we don't disappear, we just get converted into something else. There are other interpretations which I don't understand so I can't really explain them to you, but suffice to say that the common idea of Buddhism preaching reincarnation (you are a bad person, so when you die you become an insect or something) is totally incorrect. Karma is just a word for action or deed (according to Wikipedia). It doesn't mean that if you do good things, the Universe will magically make good things come back to you, like The Secret. It just means that what you put out into the world will effect the world. If you do bad things in the world, it will negatively effect the world, but it doesn't necessarily mean the Universe will directly punish you for it. Negative karma will, however, effect you in a less direct way. If you're a hateful person who abused other people, eventually it'll bite you in the rear end. And even if it doesn't, it still causes suffering in the world because of all the people you're hurting. But karma has nothing to do with psychic vibes or anything like that. Its literally just your deeds and actions in the world, not a cosmic punishment/reward system. Blame the New Agers for muddying the waters. There ARE metaphysical beliefs in Buddhism, but the specifics vary from school to school, and it's possible to be a metaphysical naturalist/physicalist and a Buddhist at the same time. Blue Star fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Aug 25, 2013 |
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Aug 25, 2013 22:14
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Cardiovorax posted:I'm sure I don't know too much about Buddhism, but that sounds like semantic quibbling to me. There's a lot of stories surrounding Buddhism that deal with rebirth and past lives, including those of the Buddha himself. You can say that it isn't precisely about souls and not precisely reincarnation, but it sounds pretty indistinguishable to me in practical terms. I'm still fairly new to Buddhism so I admit that I'm not the best person to explain it. But my main point is that you can still be a Western-style atheist and a Buddhist since the core concepts of Buddhism (the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, plus the Three Marks of existence) do not contradict modern science. Heck, you don't even need to be a Buddhist to get the benefits of things like mindfulness, which is simply the act of being mindful of your own mental states and perceptions, or meditation, which has been scientifically shown to reduce stress and other benefits which I'm too lazy to get into right now but you can Google easily enough. There is nothing innately supernatural or magical about these things and they are perfectly compatible with being an atheist or agnostic.
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Aug 25, 2013 23:57
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You guys are talking about reincarnation, as popularly imagined by Westerners. Reincarnation is when you die, and then your soul gets put into a new body, either human or animal, and inhabits that body for another life. It operates under the assumption that you have an eternal soul which contains the essence of your being, and gets passed on after the death of your physical body. Buddhism denies this. In Buddhism, there is no eternal soul. Instead, we're made up of aggregates which have serendipitously combined to form us, and we have no unchanging essence underneath it all. We're constantly changing from one moment to the next, and have no fixed identity underneath it all. Our true nature is that of emptiness because when you take away all these changing elements that form ourselves, what's left? It appears to be nothing at all. We are empty because we lack inherent existence, which means that we don't exist separately from the rest of the world but rather we're connected to everything else. Buddhism teaches nonduality, that our existences as separate beings is illusory because the truth is that we're a part of the whole world. Everything is connected to everything else, and everything depends upon everything else in order to exist. Humans are no different. So when we die, there is no eternal soul to reincarnate into a new body. Instead, our existences as individual beings comes to an end, but since it was illusory to begin with, its not like anything is annihilated, either. Its more like we get broken down and our constituent parts get recycled into the world, going on to form new phenomena. The obvious analogy is our organic molecules which get broken down and recycled by other organisms, but it can apply to our actions and deeds as well. Since everything is connected and nothing exists as a separate entity, the same is true of ourselves and our actions. A wealthy man can use his wealth to influence the world either positively or negatively. Whatever he does, the outcome of his actions (his karma) will outlive him and will go on to effect the world for long after he's dead. Those effects are rebirth, and what his rebirths are depends on what his karma was. Blue Star fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Aug 29, 2013 |
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Aug 29, 2013 05:37
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Yeah, Buddhism was really hard to wrap my mind around when I first started reading about it. It seemed to me to be a completely useless and stupid philosophy. "Yeah everything sucks and we're all going to die and there's nothing we can do about it. There's nothing worth giving a poo poo about because you're just going to lose it all. So just stop giving a poo poo (if you can)." loving useless. But then I dug deeper and I started to "get it". Nonattachment isn't apathy or indifference. Its being mindful of how things are and how reality works, including yourself and your own thoughts and feelings, to avoid suffering. You can still love people and have goals and aspirations. Sunyata doesn't mean that nothing exists or that its all meaningless crap, it means that everything exists interdependently and that its only our limited perception that creates boundaries and separation; in truth, everything is connected and a part of one endless continuum of constant change. Anatta isn't meant to be taken as some New/Internet Atheist "we're just meat robots, deal with it  " argument; instead, it means that we're verbs, not nouns. There is no essential substance or nature to ourselves. We're a dance of patterns and processes, like how a whirlpool is a process and pattern of water in a river. We dont define the whirlpool by what its made out of (water), we define it by its pattern and behavior. The whirlpool is a verb, its something the water is doing, and thats how it is with us. We're something the world is doing. Again, verbs, not nouns.I still don't know if I've "gotten" it, but the above is how I understand these concepts.
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Sep 13, 2013 02:13
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Tea Bone posted:I'm struggling to find the quote now, but I remember reading something the Dalai Lama said along the lines of "we know when the sun rises in the morning it will set again at night, but this doesn't mean we don't go about our day." Mr. Mambold posted:Get a little Buddha nature in your life, mate. Then get a lot, that hopelessness & nihilism is a phase you have to burn thru I think you guys are misunderstanding me. I'm saying that I used to think that Buddhism was all nihilistic and depressing, because I was misunderstanding concepts such as anatta, sunyata, etc. I was like "So you're telling me I have no soul and everything is pointless and rotting away with every second? I already knew that!". But as I learned more about Buddhism I started to realize what those concepts really mean. I still have a lot to learn, but the point is that I don/t think Buddhism is depressing and nihilistic anymore.
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Sep 13, 2013 21:17
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Cardiovorax posted:I still have trouble with the way people differentiate between nihilism and Buddhism. If you take away all the supernatural elements, you don't really seem to end up with two very different things. It makes a few more metaphysical claims than nihilism, but otherwise it just looks like a proactive and empirical approach to dealing with nihilism to me. "Here's how things are, here's how to deal with it." Especially with the way the Buddha advised people to avoid speculative ontological questions because there's no useful or meaningful answer to them. Less about whether life is depressing or not than about how to not be depressed about it. I really don't know. It's true that Buddhism can be separated from supernatural elements. People often accuse Buddhism of being just as supernatural and crazy as more theistic religions, and while its true that there are certain schools that treat deities, ghosts, etc. as objectively real entities, the basic core concepts of Buddhism don't require any of that. Life is suffering, we suffer because we cling to things, we can eliminate suffering, and the way to eliminate suffering is through the Eight Fold Path. That's literally it. Go ahead and tack on anatta, impermanence, and Dependent Origination, as well. But no need for devas, asuras, hungry ghosts, or what-have-you. But as for ontological metaphysics, I think Buddhism does make such declarations. Anatta is a metaphysical declaration; it's saying that there is no permanent, eternal Self which defines our essence. Everything that we believe is the Self is just an aggregate that can be separated from the whole: the physical body, thoughts, memories, sensations, etc. Taken by themselves, none of these things is the Self, so why are they collectively called the Self? Makes no sense, except as a useful fiction to get us through our daily lives. And each aggregate is subject to change: the body goes through changes, thoughts are constantly coming and going, new memories are formed and old ones are forgotten, we may lose certain sensory perceptions such as eyesight, hearing, and so on. So where's the Self? The doctrine of anatta is basically saying we don't have souls, at least as popularly imagined by most religions and spiritual movements. There is no ghost in the machine. And heck, there is no machine, for that matter, because calling ourselves machines is just another way of trying to define a Self, and this machine is itself just a mercurial and transitory combination of shifting, flowing, impermanent aggregates. And these concepts of impermanence and anatta apply to everything, according to Buddhism. Humans (and everything we create), other animals, all organisms, planets, stars, black holes, galaxies, nebula, even universes, they all are impermanent and can be better described as dynamic processes rather than static nouns. Impermanence, anatta, Dependent Origination, and sunyata are metaphysical statements about reality, and in my humble opinion they also seem to be pretty darn accurate. There is no fundamental substance or state of being that underlies all existence: everything just sort of hangs together, everything mutually supporting everything else, floating on nothing. It is only our perception that creates the illusion of separation between different things and events, but in reality everything is connected. Now, I've heard it said that the Buddha meant for impermanence/anatta/Dependent Origination to be applied only to our subjective experience, and not meant to be a description of objective reality, but frankly I think they DO describe objective reality pretty well. I can think of no phenomenon in nature that is permanent, that exists unconditionally, that is eternal, that cannot be reduced to lesser parts, etc. Even the laws of physics may vary from universe to universe, according to some theories. But hey, maybe I'm wrong. And as for nihilism, Buddhism is way different. To me, nihilists are still under the spell of Maya. They don't see things the way they truly are. They still think that things are separate from each other, that things exist intrinsically, and that they themselves have a Self which defines their nature. Oh, they may know that there's no soul intellectually, but viscerally they still feel like there's a real Self that perceives and experiences the world and is alienated from it. They just happen to believe that this Self is annihilated upon death. Even Buddhists who don't buy into Rebirth (or Reincarnation) don't believe that, because we don't believe there even is a Self to be annihilated. And nihilists make value statements about the universe at large, which Buddhism avoids doing. Value statements such as everything being pointless and meaningless. Sure, Buddhism says that there's no Supreme Being or Ultimate Purpose, but nihilists mean it in a negative way. Also, Buddhism teaches compassion and loving-kindness towards all life, whereas nihilists seem to be clinging to their negativity as an excuse to be jerkfaces.
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Sep 15, 2013 21:23
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TalonDemonKing posted:This may sound really, really odd, so I want to preface this with a bit of an apology -- I'm not trying to start anything, but am just curious. From what I understand, becoming enlightened means seeing things as they really are. It means awakening. It doesn't mean you become one-with-everything. I can't tell you exactly what its like because I'm not enlightened, but from what I've read and learned it means that you don't just understand impermanence, Depending Origination, anatta, and sunyata intellectually, but rather you actually experience them first-hand. I've actually had brief flashes where I felt like "whoa, everything's connected and I'm a whirlpool in an infinite river", but I don't know if that's what enlightenment is like or if I just had a brain fart. But achieving enlightenment is desirable because it goes a long, long way to overcoming suffering. You experience a lessening of egocentric feelings and see the "big picture" of life, and so your problems bother you way less. But again, I haven't done this myself so maybe I'm talking out of my rear end.
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Sep 26, 2013 13:33
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Yeah I have to admit that I don't quite know what you're on about, ickbar. Buddhism is just a method for dealing with suffering. It's just the Four Noble Truths plus the Eight-fold Path. It's got nothing to do with psychics or quantum physics. And Buddhism has nothing to do with metaphysical materialism. It neither denies materialism nor affirms materialism, and the same is true for other metaphysical concepts, such as idealism or dualism. Buddhism doesn't really say much about the metaphysical nature of reality, with the possible exceptions of impermanence, dependent origination, sunyata, and anatta. And even all of those are just statements of the obvious: things are always changing, everything arises from prior causes and conditions, nothing exists independently of other things, and everything is just a combination of other smaller things that temporarily come together. Those would be equally true and self-evident whether you're a materialist, a dualist, an idealist, a neutral monist, etc., or whether you believe Sylvia Brown must be the most constipated woman who ever lived (because she's so full of poo poo) or not.
Blue Star fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Oct 7, 2013 |
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Oct 7, 2013 03:25
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WAFFLEHOUND posted:To be 100% blunt, some of the people who claim to be Buddhist in this thread are not Buddhist. I don't know if you've read my posts, but i have a feeling I might be one of those folks on your list of Non-Buddhists. I am still new to Buddhism, though. I agree with you that the Buddha never preached annihilationism, and I think it's lovely and condescending that a lot of Western Buddhists try to "claim" Buddhism by saying that they have the correct interpretation of things such as rebirth and karma. From what I understand, the Buddha denied both annihilationism and eternalism because both of those ideas are egocentric. They assume that we have an essential and unchanging identity, a true self, which exists at the core of our being and which defines who we are. But Buddhism denies that we have this: we're just a temporary combination of attributes which are always changing. We're not the same being from one moment to the next, let alone over the course of years and decades. The Blue Star that is typing this post is not the same person as the Blue Star of yesterday or 10 years ago, and tomorrow this Blue Star will not exist. This Blue Star will neither be annihilated upon death nor float up into some magical afterlife. But that's just how I understand it, so correct me if I'm wrong. But as for rebirth, I admit that I've heard all kinds of things from all kinds of sources. I'm not even sure what literal rebirth is, to be honest. People have come into this thread asking about rebirth/reincarnation, and I've said that they're different because reincarnation assumes you have a soul that is placed into another body, whereas rebirth is more like your body decomposing and all of your organic molecules being recycled back into the ecosystem. What was once "you" gets remade into other things, but it's not a one-to-one transformation like with reincarnation. I thought this was literal rebirth because I don't see how it can be any other way. If we don't have an atman, what gets reborn? What travels from one body to the next? The only way I can think to reconcile it is to evoke nonduality: that we're not separate beings within a universe that is fundamentally alien to us, but that we're all one gigantic...thing that is experiencing itself from countless subjective perspectives, each one being a sentient being. But that's too close to the Hindu idea of Brahman, so...yeah, I don't know.
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Oct 8, 2013 08:07
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PrinceRandom posted:Sorry if this is a bad question, but I'm still confused at how Buddhists perceive death. No, its not like naturalism. Naturalistic atheists believe that we do have a self, but that this self is annihilated when we die. But Buddhists don't believe in a self, so what can possibly be annihilated? Buddhists believe that we're ultimately just a bundle of perceptions, sensations, mental and emotional states, etc. When you really examine yourself, you find that there's no aspect of yourself that you can really call "you". You have memories, thoughts, inclinations, a physical body (which is in turn made up of constituent parts, none of which are really you), but there's no true self at the center of it all. So there's nothing to be annihilated when we die, because there was never anything really there to begin with.
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Nov 11, 2013 11:19
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PrinceRandom posted:I'm think maybe I can phrase this in a different way. Here's how I understand it. Buddhism teaches that we don't have a true self, and that our sense of individuality and separateness from the rest of the world is an illusion or at least a useful fiction. We think of ourselves as just being individuals in flesh bags, ignoring the fact that the entire universe goes into our being. Think of all cosmological history that lead up to our solar system and planet being formed, and all of evolutionary history that lead up to Homo Sapiens evolving, and all of human history that lead up to you being born and living the life you're living now. Also think of how you interact with your environment; you're constantly exchanging materials with the outside world: eating, drinking, breathing, sweating, metabolizing, excreting, secreting, etc, and you're body is constantly changing from one moment to the next. Same with your personality and mind: it has been shaped by the world around you ever since you were born. You are not some separate entity that was dropped into the world; you ARE a process of the world in the exact same way that the weather, geological events, and so on are processes of the world. Carl Sagan would say that we are a way that the universe knows itself. That means that we're not truly separate from other people and beings, since it is only a certain perspective which creates divisions between objects and events. So when you die, the sum totality of existence has not been altered. Nothing disappeared into that good night, and when a new person is born, nothing was added. Going back to Carl Sagan real quick, we are each a part of the universe experiencing itself subjectively (and you can probably include non-human organisms, too, even bacteria and archaea). It's like the universe has a trillion eyes, all opening and closing as individual lifeforms live out their lives and die. Each eye represents a separate consciousness. Even when you die and your identity is snuffed out, there is still consciousness in the universe because new organisms are always being born and created. To ask "but what gets transferred between lives?" is missing the point, because without consciousness there is no space or time, and no medium through which to transfer anything. If you were to go under anesthesia and wake up after a trillion years, from your perspective it'd be like you just blinked. One lifeform dying and another being born is just a blink.
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Nov 13, 2013 23:36
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I'm sorry to say it, but Christianity is ultimately incompatible with Buddhism. Buddhism denounces the idea of anything being eternal, permanent, and unchanging. In Buddhism, all things are subject to impermanence and decay, and nothing has a fixed nature or identity. But Christianity posits the idea of a supreme God that is the source of everything, and which is itself eternal and everlasting. Christians also believe that we have eternal souls which define who we are, and that after death our souls join with God in Heaven. None of this is compatible with Buddhism, I'm afraid.
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Dec 4, 2013 03:16
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I think a lot of Western atheists come at it from a materialist understanding, where they see the doctrine of Not-Self and are like "Yeah, yeah, I know we don't have souls; we're just brain chemicals. Moving on", and they think they've understood anatta. Then they get hung up on rebirth because they're thinking "But when the brain dies, the self is gone, how can there be rebirth  ". The point of anatta is that the Self is merely an aggregate of lesser, simpler components which temporarily combine to give the sensation of a continuous self. You have the five senses (or at least some of those senses), you have memories, you have emotions, you have thoughts, and you have the sensation of inhabiting a body. Put all of these together and it feels like a whole: a discrete and individual entity that exists within a larger world. We think we have an immutable, congenital, and intrinsic persona underneath it all, that when you take away all thoughts, memories, perceptions, and sensations, there will still be some kind of essence that defines who and what we are. But the truth is that such a thing cannot be found. Without thought, without memory, without perception, without sensation, there appears to be nothing at all. Its void. Emptiness. And each aggregate is itself a temporary and changeable thing. You don't always feel the same emotions, you don't always have the same thoughts and memories, your body doesn't always have the same cells and it doesn't always look the same. So what stays constant throughout your life? In what ways are you the same individual as you were when you were an infant? In what ways will you still be the same individual when you're on your death bed? There is no true essential self that travels across space and time. There is only the moment-to-moment occurrences and happenings. There is anger, there is sadness, there is eating, there is digestion, there is walking, there is sleeping, there is joy, there is boredom, there is aging, and so on. And that's all there is. There is no actual individual entity that is doing all of those things, there is just the occurrence of all of those things, from moment to moment. Even when you die, there will still be the arising of perception, sensation, and so on. You may die, but again, you were just a string moment-to-moment happenings, and those moment-to-moment events of sadness, joy, anger, sight, hearing, touch, taste, lust, boredom, and so on, will still occur elsewhere. It's like if a baseball game comes to an end, there is still the concept of baseball, and there are still other baseball games being played. That particular baseball game, which took place at THAT field on THAT afternoon with THOSE exact players and THOSE exact spectators, ceased. But baseball continues elsewhere. So YOU, as a particular arrangement of sensation, perception, etc. will cease, but sensation and perception and so on will continue elsewhere. There will be new arising of happiness, fear, arousal, and what not.
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Dec 12, 2013 23:53
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What's the Buddhist position on free will? I'd say that the question of free will is irrelevant, because it's assuming the existence of a self. Materialists and dualists argue about whether we're magical spirit beings that aren't subject to physical determinism or if we're just sophisticated meat robots that are ultimately reducible to a collection of chemical reactions, the outcomes of which were predetermined by the Big Bang. But I say that both of these scenarios are treating the self as if it were real. Its either a mystical soul or simply a complicated mechanism. But Buddhism breaks the self down into a string of moment-to-moment occurrences of experience. It doesn't try to build a narrative about the self like materialism and dualism do; it just deals with what is observable at the present moment. There is thinking, there is seeing, there is breathing, there is this sensation, there is that sensation, and so on. And that's all there really is. No trying to build a backstory, just observing each experience as it happens. I think the Buddha instructed to not worry about metaphysics, as all metaphysical positions are equally irrefutable and unprovable, whereas anyone can observe the arising and falling away of phenomena, and that's all anyone can really know. But that's just my take. Those more learned and versed in Buddhism can correct me.
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Dec 13, 2013 11:05
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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 10:05 |
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Jacobeus posted:I don't mean to derail either, but I've had some thoughts that I would like to share, specifically about rebirth, and I would like to hear your responses to it if possible. That's an interesting viewpoint, but it sounds almost like solipsism: the idea that you are all that exists and everything else is merely your imagination. But I can sorta see what you're saying. If we strip away everything which is Not-Self (the body, thoughts, sensation, perception, etc.), and are left with only emptiness or voidness, then maybe that voidness is the Self, our true nature, as with everything else. Before we were conceived, there was no perception, no sensation, no reflection, no memory, only Self. But as we grew from a zygote into a fetus and finally into a fully-developed human being, we gradually developed these aggregates and started to have subjective experience created by our senses, perceptions, thoughts, and memories, all of which started to clutter our point-of-view, leaving the Self to just serve as a backdrop. As we grow and experience the world, we stop noticing the backdrop, the Self, and instead just concentrate on the temporary, fleeting, mutable, mercurial aggregates. It's also worth pointing out that according to modern neuroscience the outside world that we perceive is really a construction of our brain. In other words, you're not seeing the world as it objectively is, but only what your own brain has created. Other animals experience the world differently because they have different sensory apparatuses and brains, and therefore different mental constructs; in other words, different aggregates. So the "world" is entirely a construct of these impermanent and ever-changing aggregates, and underneath it all is the true unchanging and eternal Self, emptiness. The emptiness was there before and will remain after the aggregates have dissipated. The world is gone by the Self remains, as if the world was just a dream and the true Self woke up. It's an interesting idea but it sounds too much like Advaita Vedanta. It reifies emptiness/sunyata, giving us something to cling to as being eternal and permanent. It makes sunyata into something like Brahman, which, again, is an interesting idea but there's a reason I lean towards Buddhism and not Hinduism.
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Dec 14, 2013 04:00
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